Gamification Mechanic Monday: Prize Pacing

13th July, 2015 By An Coppens

Gamification Mechanic Monday: Prize Pacing

Creating a sense of scarcity and at the same time increasing the value of the eventual win, can be achieved with prize pacing. The objective is that your prize is distributed in small doses on a regular basis and in order to win the big prize you need to have collected all the other items. Obviously you need to have a few items in the set collected to be increasingly engaged. It’s as if you need to collect all the stickers in a collectible collection, before your book has gained value. Imagine if you are only missing one or two final stickers and the lengths you would go through in order to find them.

It is a mechanic often used in marketing to encourage people to buy more of a specific item in order to complete their collection with a chance of to gain the bigger prize. Collecting in it’s own right can be fun, but the opportunity to win a bigger prize is where this mechanic comes to play. From a company’s perspective it is also great to not have to hand out prizes to everyone and to create fun around it.

We have featured a number of marketing related campaigns, playing on this mechanic such a Halloween Babble where you collected Halloween character codes on cheese pack, which ultimately gave you a chance to gain more in their game. Mc Donalds Monopoly game also tapped into this mechanic and it is extremely popular.